J.A. Konrath achieves the stupendous feat of blending both a prequel and a sequel in this timeline-hopping thriller, expertly making the pieces click together like an intricate Swiss watch.

Over the course of her decades-long career, Detective Jacqueline "Jack" Daniels has pursued her own great white whale: a sickeningly twisted serial killer named Mr. K. Years ago, Jack came heartbreakingly close to catching him, but he managed to slip away. Now Mr. K is back from her nightmares, and she's his captive, in a secret place where she's beyond rescue. Bound and gagged, the clock ticking down till zero, Jack faces a death more excruciating than anyone's worst imaginings. She has seen Mr. K.'s other victims, so she knows how terrible her end will be.

In flashback, we see just how Jack ended up at this moment in her life. From her first exposure as a rookie to Mr. K.'s handiwork, through her career-long pursuit of her nemesis, we watch Jack grow as a cop, as a woman, and as a friend to her two eccentric colleagues, Harry and Herb. That journey is both terrifying and wildly hilarious, a wacky combination that only a writer as good as Konrath can pull off. Throw in a deeply moving denouement, and you have a story that hits every single mark.

The pace is frantic, the horrors truly horrifying, and the dialogue will have you laughing out loud even as you're gripping the pages in terror. Konrath is so good, he makes other novelists jealous--and count me as one of them.

The Sunday Book Review cover features review articles on recent liberal and conservative books by Jonathan Alter and Christopher Caldwell.

Kakutani on Life by Keith Richards: "Mr. Richards's prose is like his guitar playing: intense, elemental, utterly distinctive and achingly, emotionally direct. Just as the Stones perfected a signature sound that could accommodate everything from ferocious Dionysian anthems to melancholy ballads about love and time and loss, so Mr. Richards has found a voice in these pages "” a kind of rich, primal Keith-Speak "” that enables him to dispense funny, streetwise observations, tender family reminiscences, casually profane yarns and wry literary allusions with both heart-felt sincerity and bad-boy charm."

Ben Brantley on Finishing the Hat by Stephen Sondheim: "What's so great about 'Finishing the Hat,' the new book on songwriting by Stephen Sondheim, is implicit in its title. This self-portrait of the artist as an obsessive lyricist is about a dynamic, unending process; it's about finishing, not having finished. And the mental energy this process emanates is enough to give a reader a satisfying case of brain burn."

Marc Tracy on Scoreboard, Baby: A Story of College Football, Crime, and Complicity by Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry: "What the investigative reporter Ken Armstrong and the higher-education correspondent Nick Perry have done, first in an award-winning Seattle Times series and now in 'Scoreboard, Baby,' is lay out "” in hard-boiled style and with the verve only real storyÂ­telling can supply "” exactly whose lives were mangled in the course of the University of Washington's historic 2000 season. Their idiosyncratic characters and plots ultimately indict a vast, impersonal system that has produced dozens of such teams. The Huskies didn't break new ground here, but in so comprehensively detailing them, the authors did."

Maile Meloy onDriving on the Rim by Thomas McGuane: "McGuane's characters are always keenly written, and that makes it bewildering when continuity falters and the illusion that they're real people falls apart.... Still, there are riches here, especially sentence by crackling sentence, and Â­McGuane is as good as ever on the redeeming aspects of a troubled country "” on diving prairie falcons, the satisfactions of work, and people who tell absurd stories about themselves on their way to growing up.... Because everyone drops a stitch now and then, and who's to say that we all shouldn't get such a pass?"

Paul Greenberg on Eels by James Prozek: "As 'Eels' demonstrates, Prosek is every bit as good a writer as a painter. Perhaps this is because both his art and writing draw their inspiration from a similar challenge: to express the ineffable, fading aspect of the natural world in the industrialized era, the feeling of bright colors slipping through your fingers. It is this quality that makes 'Eels' much more than a fish book. It is an impassioned defense of nature itself, rescued from the tired rhetoric of 1970s-style environmentalism by good, honest shoe-leather reporting."

David Leavitt on Trespass by Rose Tremain: "None of the characters in 'Trespass' are likable. On the contrary, to a one, they are self-interested, embittered and vindictive. At times, Tremain's exposures, always merciless, verge on the assaultive. So authoritative is her storytelling, however, that I kept reading, until in the final pages a wholly unexpected (and wholly earned) mood of redemption suffused the narrative, and I understood her bold and risky design."

Washington Post:

Maureen Corrigan on The Confession by John Grisham: "'The Confession' is the kind of grab-a-reader-by-the-shoulders suspense story that demands to be inhaled as quickly as possible. But it's also a superb work of social criticism in the literary troublemaker tradition of Upton Sinclair's 'The Jungle.' ... 'The Confession' bangs the gavel and issues a clear verdict [about the death penalty]. As an advocacy thriller, it will rile some readers, shake up conventional pieties and, no doubt, change some minds. Whatever your politics, don't read this book if you just want to kick back in your recliner and relax."

T.J. Stiles on Washington by Ron Chernow: "Let's be clear: 'Washington' is a true achievement. A reader might agree with my criticisms yet thoroughly enjoy the book.... Chernow's goal is to humanize Washington. He succeeds handsomely, depicting an irreducibly complicated figure. Remarkable as Washington was, however, he remained embedded in his times. Unfortunately, Chernow doesn't really engage with the scholarship of Bernard Bailyn, Pauline Maier, Edward Countryman or the many other historians who have revealed so much about 18th-century America."

Charles on Great House by Nicole Krauss: "'Great House' seems to offer everything we loved about Nicole Krauss's previous novel five years ag the pursuit of a lost object fraught with meaning, multiple narrators contributing pieces of a convoluted tale, and fractured visions from across a century punctuated by the Holocaust.... 'Great House' doesn't take so many risks -- none of those clever tricks that might have seemed gimmicky the second time around -- but it also never dazzles us, never sweeps us away. Its beauty is a heavy brocade of grief that won't let these characters soar."

Los Angeles Times:

Susan Salter Reynolds on The Wake of Forgiveness by Bruce Machart: "It is an extraordinary novel in which the characters are watched and not just by their author or their readers. The clouds in the dramatic Texas sky beat out the time; the trees look down on the action and pronounce their moral judgments, and the moon, well, the moon holds the long view. The moon in so many scenes is the calm, the wise antidote to the crazy human drama unfolding below. It is a rare novel that makes a reader feel he has fallen through a crack in the earth and is swimming in the subconscious aquifer. How did he do it?"

David L. Ulin on By Nightfall by Michael Cunningham: "'By Nightfall' wants to be a novel of ideas, an inquiry into the relationship between beauty and meaning, but it can't sustain the weight of its own self-consciousness.... One reason 'The Hours' worked was its audacity; to build a novel around 'Mrs. Dalloway' is to claim, implicitly or otherwise, that it is worthy of 'Mrs. Dalloway.' Here all the literary references remind us how thin 'By Nightfall' is."

Wall Street Journal:

Michael W. McConnell on Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution by Pauline Maier (mentioned by T.J. Stiles above): "Ratification,' for all its scope and technical detail, is a gripping and eye-opening read. Ms. Maier is a member of that rare breed of historians who write vividly and with a flair for depicting dramatic events. She has benefited from an ongoing project ... to collect and publish all extant records, newspaper articles, letters and notes bearing on the subject of ratification.... She mined the papers to produce a description of the ratification process that is rich in detail, bringing to light episodes and arguments previously unknown even to constitutional historians."

Patrick Marnham on Pedigree by Georges Simenon: "Written in the dark days of Nazi-occupied France, 'Pedigree' (1948) stands alone among the author's mature novels because it took him more than two years to write, rather than the usual three weeks. 'Pedigree' is an unforgettable picture of the Belgian city of Liege and its people as observed by the innocent but pitiless eye of a very unusual little boy. It is a Dickensian portrait, with poverty, crime, lunacy, wealth, corruption, and mockery, but a complete absence of Dickensian sentimentality."

Globe and Mail:

Gale Zoe Garnett on The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog, and of His Friend, Marilyn Monroe by Andrew O'Hagan: "I have never read a more original work than Scottish novelist Andrew (Our Fathers) O'Hagan's Maf the Dog.... Many have written about this iconic, searching, damaged and luminous girl-woman.... Nothing I've read or seen more fully evokes her than her actual little dog as imagined by Andrew O'Hagan.... I don't know if O'Hagan ever met Marilyn Monroe. Through his vibrant writing, I feel I have. Maf's Marilyn will always matter to me. And, even more so, O'Hagan's Maf will always matter to me. This book is a treasure trove and a literary treasure."

Catherine Bush on Player One by Douglas Coupland: "Confronted with the collapse of the outwardly normal, Coupland's characters seek, and find, emotional connection, yet because the narrative is not as successful at enacting that emotional connection for us, it remains something we're told about, and rather sentimental.... In a sense, Coupland wants to have his cake and eat it "“ hold onto story and characters, and break them down into something new and non-linear, while warning us of the inherent dangers. There's a plea here, even as Coupland, that poignant provocateur, looks forward, for all that's on the verge of being lost."

The Guardian:

Philip Hensher on The Skating Rink by Roberto Bolan "His publishers havenow thought it worthwhile to bring out BolaÃ±o's very first published novel, The Skating Rink, hoping for a readership quite different from the tiny claque which greeted its first publication in 1993. Reading it, I wondered what one would think of it as one of those first readers. The answer is probably 'not much'. It has conspicuous, classical flaws in technique and is undeniably frustrating on its own terms. The interesting thing is that many of those flaws are exactly the things which BolaÃ±o expanded, developed, and turned into virtues of the highest originality."

John O'Connell on The Hilliker Curse by James Ellroy: "Ellroy has grown to dislike My Dark Places and now finds it 'fraudulent and dramatically expedient' "“ which is ironic considering how much of it he rehashes in this disjointed confession, alternately pious and priapic; its goal exorcism but not closure, for no one as obsessive as Ellroy could contemplate such a thing.... Ellroy takes great pride in his macho feminism, but his ceaseless objectification of women stops him from actually knowing them."

The New Yorker:

Malcolm Gladwell on Overhaul by Steven Rattner: "'Overhaul' is not a Washington memoir, even though it is set in Washington, and it involves one of the most deeply politicized issues in recent memory. It is a Wall Street memoir, a book about one of the biggest private-equity deals in history. The result is fascinating"”although perhaps not entirely in the ways that its author intended.... What Rattner cannot seem to see ... is that his contempt for G.M.'s leadership is contradicted by the evidence of the company's accomplishments. How can Wagoner be a slow-moving incrementalist when, in less than a decade, he took the world's largest company from an uncompetitive monolith to a worthy competitor of Toyota and Honda?"

David Remnick on Keef's Life (subscription only): "Half book, half brand extension, it's an entertaining, rambling monologue, a slurry romp through the life of a man who knew every pleasure, denied himself nothing, and never paid the price.... Richards admires the music of his predecessors and betters, but he does not feel their pain. He is almost uniquely insulated from the junkie's predicaments by layers of money, attorneys, and privilege."

Lane Smith and "Jackass"-gate. School Library Journal sums up the particulars of a new controversy: "While Lane Smith's It's a Book (Roaring Brook, 2010) elicits smiles for its tongue-in-cheek story of three animals in this digital age, the picture book is also gathering a few storm clouds for the proper name it assigns to a male donkey."

More National Book Award coverage. Roger Sutton at Read Roger linked to both the Horn Book's and SLJ's reviews of finalists in the NBA young people's literature category, while SLJ put up short interviews with the "Fab Five."

NYT Editors' Choice: Dust Devil. The New York Timesrecently picked Anne Isaac and Paul O. Zelinsky's Dust Devil as an "Editors' Choice," after a write-up from Bruce Barcott--which also talked about the author-illustrator duo's 1995 Caldecott Honor-winning tall tale Swamp Angel. ("Did I mention that Bart and the Desperadoes ride giant mosquitoes instead of horses? They do grow 'em big in Montana, you know.")

New Odyssey graphic novel. We're still loving the cover of Gareth Hinds' graphic novel adaptation of The Odyssey, published by Candlewick and released earlier this month to much acclaim. (From Booklist's starred review: "As the proliferation of recent Odyssey graphic novelizations approaches the record held by Shakespeare adaptations, it is perhaps appropriate that Hinds, the Bard's premiere sequential adapter, should produce the most lavish retelling of Homer yet.") Publishers Weekly has a rundown on the book's path to publication and some of Hinds' other work.

October 22, 2010

Highly Anticipated Music Bios, Part I:Life, Keith Richards's autobiography (out next week, but already topping our bestsellers list) has been getting plenty of press this week. From CBS News:

In the book, co-written with Richard's pal James Fox, the guitarist takes swipes at former Rolling Stone band mates Brian Jones and Mick Taylor and calls Beatle John Lennon a silly sod" and poet Allen Ginsberg "a gasbag."

And the latest speculation from the internet rumor mill is that Richards could be cut out of the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film due to the contents of the book.

This October, I had every intention of featuring a Halloween and/or horror-themed comic each week on Graphic Novel Friday. I really did. But then Absolute Promethea Book Two arrived in the mail. Halloween will have to wait.

Co-created by Alan Moore and artist J.H. Williams III, Promethea is a mind-bending, ambitious journey. The initial twelve chapters were collected in Absolute Promthea Book One last October, which is full of high-minded action and fight sequences. But then the series takes a very strange turn, and it's in this month's Absolute Promethea Book Two where Moore and Williams unfold an adventure unlike any other in comics (see an earlier post for further plot details).

These Absolute Editions serve less as reading venues and more as celebrations and objets d'art. The heady mindscapes at work in Book Two are in full bloom: double-page spreads abound and carefully placed panels are on display; tiny background details flutter into later pages; across the cosmos, stars trail through text balloons, connecting panels and figures. Reading the original five volume collection that was published in a smaller trim size, it's easy to glaze over the finer moments amidst the giant plot and Moore's sprawling text. But here it makes sense--the biggest story of Moore and Williams' careers could only properly fit on the largest canvas. Once a twisting, eye-crossing visual, the MÃ¶bius strip (see above image, click to enlarge) in Chapter 15, for example, is now a spectacle. The reader can pick from any text balloon in the five panels and begin reading, as the two most recent Prometheas wind up and over themselves while carrying a conversation that grows in any order it is read. No matter how coolly Moore may now feel towards contemporary comics, it's in his ABC Universe, traveling the Immateria and Kaballistic knowledge system with Promethea, where his affection for the medium is still apparent:

"Your dance is where matter meets imagination, because that's our whole universe, right there. I wanted to tell you I love you. I probably don't tell you that enough." Lines like this could just as easily be trite, but Moore makes them earnest; likewise his digressions into the carnal lairs of inspiration. It's adult, at times outlandish, but never exploitative. In Book Two he can be guilty of trying the patience of unsuspecting readers who walked into a twelve chapter lecture on Life, the Universe, and Everything According to Alan Moore, but he tempers it with flashes to the cutthroat exploits of Sophie's best friend, Stacia, who is back home and under the power-hungry spell of a previous Promethea. There's a rhythm to reading these chapters, and the rewards mount the further the reader goes.

This year, J.H. Williams III likely garnered new fans with his artwork in Batwoman: Elegy (written by Greg Rucka). The way he played with perspective and panels in Elegy can be especially traced to Chapter 18 in Book Two, where he uses the body and appendages of Asmodeus, a demonic spider, to splinter layouts and panels (see above image, click to enlarge). Williams is able to manipulate the passage of time using any number of panels (or pages) to articulate Moore's script while deftly maneuvering the reader through complicated, unusual sequences. The credits also attribute the painted colors in Chapter 22 to Williams, but I'm curious how the Van Gogh tribute in Chapter 19 was achieved. It certainly looks painted--but is colorist Jeremy Cox responsible for the backgrounds in that chapter? Its misty blues are fantastic.

While the supplemental section doesn't answer the above, there is plenty of commentary by Williams, including never-before-published sketches, a cover that was "shredded" for being "a little much for a cover that would sit face-front on the shelf of your local comics shop," and hints for what is to come in Absolute Promethea Book Three. At over twenty-five pages, these extras are welcome after Book One's lack thereof. The collection also features new wrap-around covers by Williams on both the book and slipcase, as well as a few Easter eggs inside for close readers.

Book Two showcases an unparalleled attempt at comics storytelling in an already eye-opening series by two comics creators who fully complement each other. This new edition has to be opened to be believed.

October 21, 2010

I've already given the great Amy Sedaris--who somehow manages to combine in one person the virtues of Cindy Sherman, her brother, and Shawn Johnson--a shout-out this week, but I didn't even mention her new book, Simple Times. I'd say more, but I'll let her introduce it herself, along with her own home-crafted reading device, the Perusaltron (sp?), in this video message to Amazon customers:

Canada has always embraced its own, from the Guess Who to Eric McCormack, even when they make it big out in the wider world, and there's no better example of that than the touching and fitting tribute that Gordon Pinsent, the grand old man of Canadian acting, paid this week on the CBC's This Hour Has 22 Minutes to Ontario's latest cultural export, Justin Bieber, with a dramatic reading from his new memoir, Justin Bieber: First Step 2 Forever:

October 20, 2010

Trying out the Tyrant: HTML Giant, which sometimes seems like the nerve center for nervy literary up-and-comers, introduces a nice innovation: the Literary Magazine Reading Club. Book clubs, to be honest, have never really appealed to me, but this does, since part of the weirdness of reading most lit mags is that you feel like you might be the only one doing so in the entire world. They begin with issue 8 of the New York Tyrant, which best I can tell is not available on Amazon, though some earlierissues are. (Via BookSlut)

James Franco, time to apply: I'm not sure if I missed these announcements earlier, but the NYU Creative Writing Program has inked two of the very top contenders for Most Interesting and Fabulous Fiction Writers Today for their faculty: Zadie Smith as a tenured prof, and Junot Diaz as a Distinguised Writer in Residence for this year.

Guide to The Instructions: Curious about Adam Levin's new 1,030-page novel from McSweeney's, The Instructions, but unsure of the commitment? (On the plus side, the book itself is weirdly light for its size, as if the pages were made of Rice Krispies.) Foster Kamer in the Voice says that it wears its heavy influences (teen-lit classics fromThe Chocolate War and The Outsiders to Eggers and Harry Potter) lightly, in a "hysterical, heartfelt journey of self-discovery."

Moving and shaking: News all over the place that the author of The Kennedy Detail, former Secret Service agent Gerald Blaine, came a "split second" away from shooting LBJ while protecting his house, just hours after he became president, sends the book up today's Movers & Shakers list. (Surprisingly, though, the book nixes another legendary scandal, saying that Marilyn Monroe could never have had a liaison with JFK while he was president.)

Okay, so Threadless by Jake Nickell can be about the t-shirts if you want it to be, or it can be a book about an innovative little company founded by Nickell that, by allowing anyone to submit a t-shirt design and have it voted on, became not just a business success story but also created a flourishing online community and a legion of t-shirt wearers who feel invested in what they're buying.

I have to admit, on my first pass-through, I just looked at the pretty (and awesome) images, because the author and Abrams have done a great job of mixing up static shots of various designs with people actually wearing the t-shirts, in addition to a few photographs of Nickell and staff hard at work at Threadless Central. The title page shots that divide the book up by year are often hilarious. The t-shirts themselves make clear why Threadless is such a good idea: where else would you find so such a variety styles and approaches to art in a single book and think "wow" rather than "what an unholy mess?"

However, after you get over the fascinating eye candy, Threadless still fascinates because Nickell does a nice job of charting the company's origins and progress across a decade of change and development. Not only do you get a good sense of the challenges facing the company but also of the shifting nature of the online landscape in the 2000s, along with some wonderful insight into creative process. There are several pages that include a design and then the creator's explanation of their inspiration. The section on "crowdsourcing" and why Nickell doesn't like the term is interesting as well.

In short, there's enough meaty text here to satisfy you once you've browsed through the art. But I think that I've given you more than enough words about Threadless. Check out these images, with more to look at here.

October 19, 2010

This handwritten spreadsheet, said to be J.K. Rowling's blueprint for the plot of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, has been making its way around the blogosphere over the last week or so. While I did see a comment from one Potter fan who claims this was posted to Rowling's website years ago, I sure couldn't find it. Is this spreadsheet genuine Rowling scrawl? For now, the jury is still out, but regardless of its authenticity this humble sheet of paper is giving fans hours of entertainment before the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows movie releases (one month from today).